An emotional Modi talks about his life's influences in an exclusive interview with Time magazine for next week's cover feature on "Why Modi Matters" with a picture of the Prime Minister in a light saffron kurta and white churidars.

"The world needs India to step up as a global power," Time says and asks: "One year in can Prime Minister Narendra Modi deliver?"

Speaking mostly in Hindi, Modi talked about everything from his ambitions for India to the global war on terrorism to what personally moves him.

Asked what influences him, Modi choked and teared up saying: "This touches my deepest core. I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child."

“My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life. I decided that I would not live for myself but would live for others," he was quoted as saying.

His biggest challenge on becoming the Prime Minister, Modi said, "was that I was new to the federal government structures.

"Different departments tend to work in silos. Each department seems to (be) a government in itself. My effort has been to break these silos down, (so that) everybody looks at a problem in a collective manner. I see the federal government not as an assembled entity but as an organic entity," he said.

Asked whether he would like to have the kind of authoritarian power that China's leader has, Modi said: "India is a democracy; it is in our DNA. So if you were to ask me whether you need a dictatorship to run India, No, you do not. Whether you need a powerful person who believes in concentrating power, No, you do not," he said.